Recording the spirit of the city
October 1, 2002
LENA CORNER talks about creative processes and public art with ANDREW MAC, curator and illuminator of the Citylights Project.
Ten years ago, the Melbourne laneway Centre Place wasn’t somewhere you’d ever stop to linger. It was little more than a commuter thoroughfare. In the shops that weren’t lying vacant, the last of a dying breed of CBD businesses – the cobbler, the key cutter and the butcher – vied for passing trade. A few homeless people found shelter in the alley’s alcoves but aside from that, CBD living hadn’t been invented yet. This was a laneway so deserted, that even graffiti artists didn’t stop to tag it.
At the time Andrew Mac, a student in his final year of art college, was scouting the city for a studio space. He came upon Centre House on the corner of Centre Place and Flinders Lane and discovered a breeding ground of legal and not-so-legal activity hidden away from the watchful eye of the authorities. But two years on, the inevitable occurred. The developers moved in and Centre House suddenly found it had company when residents started moving into Majorca House. ‘We’d had this fantastic studio going in the middle of the city with no one around,’ says Mac. ‘We got used to staying up all night, having parties and playing loud music. Then suddenly, five feet across the laneway, a load of people moved in to live.’
Instead of antagonising his new neighbours, Mac thought creatively. Bypassing Melbourne officialdom entirely, he opened up the empty shops, invited artists and bands down and threw a big exhibition and party in the street. ‘We thought we’d try and make the new residents aware from the start that there was a culture already here – that Centre Place was a work area as well as a place where they were living. That was the political aim of the show.’
The night was a great success and when the City of Melbourne got wind of what was going on, they invited Mac to turn it into something a little more above board. So in September 1996, along with artists Richard Butler-Bowden, Richard Brownfield and Lyndal Walker, he opened Citylights – an outdoor lightbox gallery on the walls of the Centre Place’s garbage collection point.
‘We felt that a lot of people felt alienated by art. That they thought it was elitist and they had no entry way into discovering what it meant,’ says Mac. ‘But on the other hand they understood the language of advertising very well – even messages that were subtle and highly sophisticated.’ So the idea behind the project was simply to do what advertisers do to us all the time and present images designed to be seen fleetingly by a mass, non-captive audience. ‘It’s opportunism,’ says Mac. ‘By merely being in their environment, we’re trying to catch them as they go about their normal daily activity.’ According to Mac roughly 40 000 people pass the Citylights project on a daily basis. When the gallery first opened he sat for days on the steps nearby counting every single person that passed by.
It is the nature and diversity of this audience, which dictates the type of work that goes on show in Citylights. Mac prides himself in being one of the most responsive spaces in Melbourne. ‘Because it’s in the public domain, one of the prime aims of Citylights is to be active and reflective of events and cultural change and responsive to things as they’re moving.’
The current show, Destination Unknown raises questions about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and its indigenous population. It’s a collaboration by photographer Zoe Ali and Melbourne author Christos Tsiolkas, and was installed less than two months after the artists first approached Mac with the idea
‘Citylights, by being an art space right in the middle of the metropolis offers us a unique opportunity for us to address an urban audience and to ask questions of exclusion and belonging to this land,’ say Ali and Tsiolkas. ‘We hope that the work will also offer our urban viewer a moment of stillness in which to contemplate their own relationship to exile and territory.’
Since the beginning of this year, the site at Centre Place has taken on a life of its own as the graffiti and stencil artists have moved in. As the council, for the moment at least, seems to have given up cleaning-up the area with its varying shades of beige paint; the preoccupations and politics of Melbourne youth are there for everyone to see. It’s moved on from being something that you pass by or chance upon and is now a valuable document, living and changes, that records the spirit of the city.
‘Back in 1996 we realised the area was going to become gentrified. We were all well aware of the history of New York and one of our main aims was to maintain a space for the artists in the face of this. We thought, if we could get just one wall, it was likely we’d be able to hold on to it. If we’d have opened an artist run space there, we’d have been kicked out years ago as the rents have quadrupled in five years. We talked about it a lot at the time and I’m still amazed it’s worked out exactly as we thought it would.’